Militant Nursing

This collection of works on the history of nursing attests to the breadth of interest in the subject as well as its larger significance for the histories of gender, women, race, militaries, wars, and struggles for equal rights. As the centenary of World War I rekindles public interest in the war's nurses, and perhaps nursing in general, these authors point to the way popular images of nurses as romantic heroines obscure a more complex and interesting reality. The authors reveal the nuance of how gender, class, and race shaped the development of nursing as a profession from the mid-nineteenth century forward. At the same time, they argue that gender provided nurses—especially women—with power and respect as they fought for increased authority and professional recognition within medical, social, and military hierarchies. Even for nurses working outside military or wartime settings, these studies suggest that the global history of nursing is inseparable from the history of wars and militaries. In Europe, Russia, and the United States, wars provided nurses with unparalleled opportunities for advanced practice and standing that had lasting effects in the profession and beyond.

This review considers the five books as a whole in an effort to evaluate major analytical trends shaping the study of nursing history. Thus, instead of reviewing each book separately, I offer a topical consideration of their examination of nursing's development and its relationship to gender. The authors examine various places, time periods, and contexts, collectively revealing the ways gender transcended these differences to shape nursing's development. At the same time, the authors' careful analyses remind us that context is critical. Across time and place, gender functioned to frame nursing as women's work, although as the authors insist, understandings of gender varied in different communities in important ways.

In examining the history of nursing developments, the authors point to the fundamental ways gender conventions both legitimized and limited women's work as nurses. Both women and men, historically, had nursed in civilian societies and in wars, but as the practice of nursing professionalized with formal training and registration requirements in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, essentialist gender understandings and hierarchies solidified the work as most appropriate for women. Patricia D'Antonio, Libra Hilde, and Charissa Threat note that as the Crimean and US Civil wars demonstrated a need for organized, professional nursing care, the armed forces on both sides of the Atlantic turned to women. Preferring to use able-bodied men as soldiers instead of nurses (or stewards, as they were often called), military leaders drew from conventional ideologies of women as innate nurturers and caregivers to construct wartime nursing as respectable work for women. As nurses and physicians organized formal nurse education in the years following these wars, they similarly relied on popular ideas of feminine submission and sympathy to craft the nature and meaning of nursing work. Where nursing remained an untrained, quasi-religious work, as Christine Hallett and Laurie S. Stoff show it was in France and Russia, gendered religious ideology strengthened associations between feminine self-sacrifice and nursing, and similarly explained women...